This one is like the books in the auxiliary series, which tells the backstory of her parents. A little less Mary-Sue, probably because she has to share the attention with another protagonist.

Down with Jake (the one dimensional bore-fest) and bring back Ed already! And not cursorily as a moping sideliner with zero impact, bring him back into the action! Also, where is Heather? Seriously, most of the interesting characters have been gradually written out of this series; Mary, Ella, Sam, Heather and even Ed it seems. I don't get it.

Love the description for this book!

More like 2.5.

I see we're continuing the trend of book titles having nothing to do with the contents of the book.

I was getting really weird vibes from this book, like all these little factoids about Gaia's life were being mentioned as if we already knew them (since when is it called the Organization? And since when has Gaia known/thought about her grandfather?), so I checked the series list and it turns out two "super editions" had been published at this point. I'm guessing that's where we were supposed to have picked up all this information.

Anyway, moving on. Jake remains cool (and his favorite movie is The Fast and the Furious, so he clearly has good taste). Sam is starting to annoy me. This part was downright stalkerish:

n  Jake is too new. Too green. He can't possibly know Gaia as well as I do. Gaia and I have a history--a whole heart-wrenching, mutual lust and longing kind of history. And that doesn't just go away because some mojo-having tool enters the picture.

No. Gaia loves me. It may be buried. It may be confused with something else. It may be a while before she realizes it. But Gaia Moore is mine. We were meant to be together. We're soul mates.

And sooner or later she's going to realize it, too.n

Like, dude, is Francine Pascal setting you up to be evil now? Calm the fuck down. That's straight out of some Sweet Valley High thriller edition or something, sheesh.

Summary: Tom tries to find out who his kidnapper is through Natasha and eventually learns it's Yuri aka Dmitri, Jake spends more time with Gaia, Ed continues missing Gaia while hanging with Kai, Coordinates are retrieved from the laptop obtained from Yuri's apartment through an earlier investigation with Gaia, Jake, Oliver, and Tom, Sam provides some information to Gaia which greatly helps in locating Yuri, The gang successfully manages to take down Yuri after infiltrating his mansion, and Sam thinks Oliver may be becoming Loki again but Gaia ends the book on a happy note.

Freak could have been better, but in all honesty it's slightly better compared to the last trainwreck of a story I read through.

1. The way Dmitri/Yuri was set up to be a bigger, badder villain than Loki ever was only to be taken down in the same book was an infuriating letdown. Seriously, you build up this villain only for him to be easily taken down? Imagine any video game with the powerful final boss being built up as frighteningly strong and unbeatable only to get to said level and beat it with only 1 move? That's anti-climactic at it's worst.

2. Also the twist of "This good guy is actually a villain" has been done numerous times; so much that it's possibly Fearless' biggest cliche.

3. I honestly thought Aidan and Johnny's backstory was more interesting than the current plot. Too bad it'll likely never be revisited in the future.

4. I find the fact that Yuri being Gaia's grandfather completely contradicts some details from the earlier Fearless books. Gaia claimed to not know anything about her grandparents, from saying they were Holocaust survivors, and now acknowledging that Yuri was a terrible person. What?

...........